Firefox as a Leading Brand

We recently looked at the spike in activity of Firefox related search terms on Download Day. Following up on that post, I wanted to find other interesting ways to put the launch into perspective. For example, looking at “Firefox” on Google Trends shows us that traffic of firefox was off the charts during launch – something on the order of 2X what occurred with the Firefox 2 launch in 2006.

Pushing this perspective a bit further, I thought it would be interesting to see how both the Firefox 3 launch and the historical trend stack up against other products and organizations. While there are a lot of different ways to go about this, I took the top three “best global brands” according to the latest report from Interbrand and BusinessWeek.

Plugging “Firefox”, “Coca Cola”, “Microsoft”, and “IBM” into Google Trends returned the following:

Notice a trend here? Two brands show a downward trend and one shows an upward trend over time. While this isn’t exactly a fair or rigorous brand analysis, it is cool to see Firefox trending so well.

Furthermore, in addition to the point raised by the previous comment, this assumes that search is a good indicator for brand recognition, and it isn’t. Coca-Cola is probably much more widely recognized than any of these tech brands, but it’s not a brand that you would search for online.